Lucky escapes

Author
Discussion

take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey

5,158 posts

55 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
McGee_22 said:
Your first assumption is probably still correct.

A Submarine very often does training exercises with specialist trainers and observers prior to deployment; the exercises are round the clock for a week to 10 days (IIRC), sometimes longer if you're all a bit crap and the 'pretend' faults are actually not that easy to revert as flicking a switch. The chap who runs this merry bunch of bds is known as Captain Submarine Sea Training, CSST.

Submarines have maximum diving depths that are calculated by very, very clever office based scientists and boffins who I think assume and factor in supposedly (hopefully) enormous safety margins for two reasons;
1. They hope never to be found out by a Sub going pop in 'normal' circumstances, and
2. They hope never to be found on a submarine to be proved fatally wrong in their complicated long division sums.

Submarine crews occasionally go to their maximum diving depths in training exercises and the odd noises and curious and ominous clues of the outside pressure at those depths makes the crew not want to;
1. Do it too often, and
2. Go any further.

Beyond this is a calculated crush depth which I assume is the scientists version of a fun office lottery.

The submarine Trimming Officer is meant to know the weight of the submarine and the balance of the submarine such that should it stop moving or lose propulsion it would just sit, stable, fore and aft, port and starboard, at a certain depth and not roll, pitch, bob up like a cork, or heaven forbid, sink like a stone. Forward propulsion, ie, moving, can often disguise a small calculation error here but you just hope you don't lose forward propulsion...

When a reactor shuts down it is called a SCRAM. In normal civilian life this is a very major event and restarting can sometimes take a day or days if the SCRAM was unplanned, but with military reactors there was/still is(?) an enormous amount of leeway on operating characteristics so reactors can be restarted a little (lots) more quickly than civilian reactors. That said, the trainers could instigate an 'extended scram' which would mean in real terms the reactor would actually cool further and genuinely be much harder (poisons and stuff) to restart should we really need its power in a hurry.

Hydraulic systems on submarines are very critical for controlling the rudder (left/right) and hydroplanes (up/down).

So what I was saying earlier was that our exercises had commenced and all appeared reasonably well, we were about four or five days in but the Trainers had been increasing the pressure. In this particular session they shut down the reactor for an extended time whilst we already fairly deep and they also put a fault on the hydraulic systems.

We soon discovered the Trimming Officers playmobile abacus had failed in his sweaty hands and we did start sinking rather like a stone; whilst this was was quite amusing for the Trainers for a little while the fact that a real hydraulic failure on the remaining hydraulics meant we were still pointing down and unable to drive up on any remaining power. It got considerably less amusing when the CO (Commanding Officer - the bloke who actually signed for and was responsible for the submarine) had to point to CSST that we had in fact passed our maximum diving depth and just how far down was he intending to take us?

We then blew lots (and lots and lots) of air into the ballast tanks in an attempt to act like a cork, removed the hydraulic failures to help point the submarine upwards and then threw the civilian reactor operating guidelines into the bin and attempted to restart the nuclear reactor as quickly as possible.

There are roughly four normal methods of starting a military reactor; a normal start-up, a planned (slow) reactor recovery, a reactor fast recovery, and an emergency fast recovery. No CO ever asks for the last one unless he believes the st is on the fan. No MEO (Marine Engineering Officer - the guy that signed for and is responsible for the reactor and its safety) would ever agree and order the last one unless a quick mental calculation told him the fan was already slowing due to a very increased st intake.

Our survival at this point hinged on restarting the reactor really, really quickly without tripping any safety parameters and causing an automatic safety systems shutdown of the reactor which might have been... bad.

There is a knob on the Nuclear Reactor Operating Panel specifically for withdrawing, or inserting, the control rods that can increase, or decrease, the criticality levels within the reactor; it is a tremendous wheeze or in-joke to call the man who is manning the panel at the time, 'the knob on the panel'.

HTH.
Worth adding for those intetested... Beyond a certain depth a submarine essentially becomes a plane. You can blow like a cheap hooker but the only way you're getting back to the surface is by 'flying' back... So having propulsion is pretty important.

Busy day in manoeuvring that day.

What do you finish as then Cat A or B?

I suspect we probably know a few of the same people.

ETA... As for crush depth calcs. Just a made up number. If you're around that depth, you're probably f***** anyway so it's kinder for it to be a surprise. Plus it saves a few quid off the design cost hehe



Edited by take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey on Monday 29th June 09:33

Benmac

1,468 posts

216 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Mikebentley said:
As a kid was on the Herald of Free Enterprise within 24hrs of the disaster.
We may have crossed paths. My family and I were on the corresponding sailing to the one that sank the day before the disaster.

Trevatanus

11,123 posts

150 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
steviegunn said:
One of my ex girlfriends walked past the 1991 bin bomb the IRA left at Victoria Station an hour before it went off.
As a youngster, I used to love the "buzz" of London, although I rarely go there now.
Spent ages trying to get my now ex-wife to go to London for the day, but she did not want to go, because "the IRA might blow it up"
She finally relented, and we made a pre-Christmas shopping trip to Central London, arriving at Piccadilly Circus at around 1130am on 17th December 1992.
How can I be so sure of the time and date? It was about half an hour after the bombing of John Lewis in Oxford Street
yikes

breamster

1,015 posts

180 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
As a 13 year old I had the amazing opportunity to visit the Royal Marine School of Music in Kent to be taught for a day. They were the nicest bunch of guys and gave a great welcome to a bunch of snotty nosed kids.

About a month later the IRA bombed the place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_barracks_bombin...

The room I was in was destroyed. I'm not 100% sure but I'm pretty sure one of the musicians that taught me was one of those killed.

It wasn't a very close escape from my own perspective but it had a profound effect.




tr7v8

7,192 posts

228 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Years ago engineering manager for a small IT company doing printers. New Years eve we get a call out & one of my juniors takes it. Screws it up up royally & is on the phone all night for help. I see the new year in with my Ex & my parents, we jump in the car & drive into the city of London. Work all night & leave around 7:45 in the morning. Coming through Earls Court we get to some traffic lights behind another car. The lights change & the car in front moves off. Because I'm tired I am a bit slow getting going. As we start moving a Vauxhall Victor tanks across the red light & removes the boot from the car in front. If we'd been further forward he'd have hit us & possibly my door! Close....

BigMon

4,190 posts

129 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Again, small beer compared with some here and, even worse, totally self inflicted.

I'd just bought my first 'performance' car after a series of sheds (K reg XR2i with an astounding 105bhp!) and was living in Cheltenham and working at Xerox in Mitcheldean at the time.

As I was turning off the A40 to Mitcheldean I had a 205 GTI behind me so decided to put my hoof down. For anyone who knows it, it's a road with a big hedge on one side and bank into a farmers field on the other.

Anyway, going round a sweeping bend at idiot speed I felt the back end go light so panicked and touched the brakes. The car went sideways and I slid down the road and miraculously didn't go through the hedge, down the bank or into anything coming the other way.

I think I would have been killed if I'd gone down the bank or hit anything coming the other way.

Not something I'm proud of and it really shook me up at the time.

JakeT

5,430 posts

120 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Mikebentley said:
As a kid was on the Herald of Free Enterprise within 24hrs of the disaster.
In March 2005 wife and I were staying in Egypt all inclusive and needed to escape the hotel. Rented a private taxi and went to Dahab. It was April 2006. What a dump it was too. Found a cat infested place called Alladins and sat there alone eating our meal which we shared with a million flies and almost as many cats. The next day a terrorist bomb killed some American tourists where we were sitting. Very sobering.
We had the same. Planned on going to Sharm El Sheikh, but changed plans last minute. Very grateful for doing so.

Nezquick

1,461 posts

126 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
A few I know of (none have happened to me though).

1. My Grandad was meant to be at Abbeystead on that fateful night in 1984 with my Grandma but he came down with food poisoning earlier that day and neither of them went in the end. .

2. I worked in an office building in Manchester and the girl who sat opposite me went out for lunch. She'd just walked out of the building and crossed the road when a huge pane of glass fell out of the 8th floor above the entrance/exit and hit the road about 5m behind her where she'd just walked. She was covered in glass but didn't have a scratch on her. She was a bit pale and shaky when she came back in though.

Magnum 475

3,538 posts

132 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
July 7th, 2005. I just missed a Piccadilly Line train at Kings Cross - the doors closed inches from me. Oh well, I'll get the next one. Approximately a minute later a suicide bomber exploded on the train that I'd just missed. Decided to walk to my destination rather than risk any other sort of public transport - good thing as someone else decided to blow themselves up on a bus shortly after.

March 2007 - ditched the woman I'd been dating for a few years having realised that the crazy was strong in that one. Now married to a rare Unicorn who is both hot and not crazy.

November 1989 - two truck drivers played sandwiches with my ancient Triumph Herald while I was driving. The car was utterly totalled, and I walked away without so much as a scratch.






tribalsurfer

1,139 posts

119 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Pretty lame compared to some of the stories on here. I was on a placement year from Uni working up in London. Almost every night I caught the same train back to Watford Junction. 2 minutes before leaving the office a mate phoned to see if I wanted a post work jar. Sweetest tasting beer ever as it meant I missed this

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watford_rail_crash

Drive it fix it repeat

1,046 posts

51 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
McGee_22 said:
Drive it fix it repeat said:
The only bit I understood of that is that your a knob hehewink
For those of us not 'in the know' can we have that in plain english please?
Your first assumption is probably still correct.

A Submarine very often does training exercises with specialist trainers and observers prior to deployment; the exercises are round the clock for a week to 10 days (IIRC), sometimes longer if you're all a bit crap and the 'pretend' faults are actually not that easy to revert as flicking a switch. The chap who runs this merry bunch of bds is known as Captain Submarine Sea Training, CSST.

Submarines have maximum diving depths that are calculated by very, very clever office based scientists and boffins who I think assume and factor in supposedly (hopefully) enormous safety margins for two reasons;
1. They hope never to be found out by a Sub going pop in 'normal' circumstances, and
2. They hope never to be found on a submarine to be proved fatally wrong in their complicated long division sums.

Submarine crews occasionally go to their maximum diving depths in training exercises and the odd noises and curious and ominous clues of the outside pressure at those depths makes the crew not want to;
1. Do it too often, and
2. Go any further.

Beyond this is a calculated crush depth which I assume is the scientists version of a fun office lottery.

The submarine Trimming Officer is meant to know the weight of the submarine and the balance of the submarine such that should it stop moving or lose propulsion it would just sit, stable, fore and aft, port and starboard, at a certain depth and not roll, pitch, bob up like a cork, or heaven forbid, sink like a stone. Forward propulsion, ie, moving, can often disguise a small calculation error here but you just hope you don't lose forward propulsion...

When a reactor shuts down it is called a SCRAM. In normal civilian life this is a very major event and restarting can sometimes take a day or days if the SCRAM was unplanned, but with military reactors there was/still is(?) an enormous amount of leeway on operating characteristics so reactors can be restarted a little (lots) more quickly than civilian reactors. That said, the trainers could instigate an 'extended scram' which would mean in real terms the reactor would actually cool further and genuinely be much harder (poisons and stuff) to restart should we really need its power in a hurry.

Hydraulic systems on submarines are very critical for controlling the rudder (left/right) and hydroplanes (up/down).

So what I was saying earlier was that our exercises had commenced and all appeared reasonably well, we were about four or five days in but the Trainers had been increasing the pressure. In this particular session they shut down the reactor for an extended time whilst we already fairly deep and they also put a fault on the hydraulic systems.

We soon discovered the Trimming Officers playmobile abacus had failed in his sweaty hands and we did start sinking rather like a stone; whilst this was was quite amusing for the Trainers for a little while the fact that a real hydraulic failure on the remaining hydraulics meant we were still pointing down and unable to drive up on any remaining power. It got considerably less amusing when the CO (Commanding Officer - the bloke who actually signed for and was responsible for the submarine) had to point to CSST that we had in fact passed our maximum diving depth and just how far down was he intending to take us?

We then blew lots (and lots and lots) of air into the ballast tanks in an attempt to act like a cork, removed the hydraulic failures to help point the submarine upwards and then threw the civilian reactor operating guidelines into the bin and attempted to restart the nuclear reactor as quickly as possible.

There are roughly four normal methods of starting a military reactor; a normal start-up, a planned (slow) reactor recovery, a reactor fast recovery, and an emergency fast recovery. No CO ever asks for the last one unless he believes the st is on the fan. No MEO (Marine Engineering Officer - the guy that signed for and is responsible for the reactor and its safety) would ever agree and order the last one unless a quick mental calculation told him the fan was already slowing due to a very increased st intake.

Our survival at this point hinged on restarting the reactor really, really quickly without tripping any safety parameters and causing an automatic safety systems shutdown of the reactor which might have been... bad.

There is a knob on the Nuclear Reactor Operating Panel specifically for withdrawing, or inserting, the control rods that can increase, or decrease, the criticality levels within the reactor; it is a tremendous wheeze or in-joke to call the man who is manning the panel at the time, 'the knob on the panel'.

HTH.
Very interesting. Thank you for the in depth
( wink ) description.

Pinkie15

1,248 posts

80 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
20 Jul 1982; school trip to Natural History & Science museums, coach drove round Hyde Park about 1030. IRA bomb exploded about 10 minutes later. Can't remember hearing the explosion, but in my head I can still hear sound of shrapnel (the nails) raining down.




CharlieH89 said:
I was driving to Manchester one night to see Russell Howard. Roads were a bit icy.
Driving along the M62 and all of a sudden the car infront loses control and spins around in the middle of the motorway.
I immediately reacted by going into the right lane making sure there was space and carried on.
As cars were going 60-70mph I didn’t get chance to see what had happened behind.

An absolute mental event especially with not knowing if there was a crash after seeing a car lose control in the middle of a motorway at 6pm.
Been the one to loose control; miserable rainy / sleety Nov night in late 90s, somewhere between Crewe & Manchester. Driving my dad's Alfa 33, just overtaken half a dozen HGVs, passing under a flyover and changing lanes when there's lying snow. Car suddenly points towards central res, remember thinking 'don't lift', but must have done, car snaps round, does at least a 720 (maybe 1080) back across all 3 lanes, remember seeing an embankment & thinking we're going backwards over that, but somehow hit verge hard and stopped in hard shoulder pointing in the right direction. All 6 artics we'd just overtaken hurtled past at unabated speed.

Magnum 475

3,538 posts

132 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Pinkie15 said:
Been the one to loose control; miserable rainy / sleety Nov night in late 90s, somewhere between Crewe & Manchester. Driving my dad's Alfa 33, just overtaken half a dozen HGVs, passing under a flyover and changing lanes when there's lying snow. Car suddenly points towards central res, remember thinking 'don't lift', but must have done, car snaps round, does at least a 720 (maybe 1080) back across all 3 lanes, remember seeing an embankment & thinking we're going backwards over that, but somehow hit verge hard and stopped in hard shoulder pointing in the right direction. All 6 artics we'd just overtaken hurtled past at unabated speed.
Reminds of one a few years ago (I didn't consider it a narrow escape at the time). Driving along the M54, straight into a hailstorm. Three cars in front of me lost it and crashed, one into the central reservation, two off the hard shoulder. I somehow slalomed straight through the gaps and carried on. I suspect my shiny brand new winter rubber may have played a part here though.



steviegunn

1,416 posts

184 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Got a couple of ones from working offshore to add.

I was working on the DSV Witchqueen laying umbilical pipe at East Breaks in the Gulf of Mexico in 1995 when hurricane Opal decided to head towards us, as we had pipe attached to the rig we had to ride it out, just after midnight the whole ship lost all power and started drifting in very rough seas, all aboard were stood at muster stations ready to abandon ship, after a couple of hours of being battered around power was restored, the umbilicals had acted as a sea anchor and probably saved the ship from rolling over, trashed the pipes and turned a 10 day job into a 2 month one.

In 1994 on the Europipe Project (big gas pipeline from Sleipnir in Norway to Emden in Germany) during one of the pre-site surveys the magnetometer pick up some targets, the ROV was sent to investigate and I was in the ROV cabin when the driver approached the round metallic object with spikes and proceeded to run into it with the ROV under the ship in about 30m of water, turned out to be a mine that if it had gone off could have sunk the survey ship, Danish Navy came in to deal with it, we found well over a dozen mines on that project.

Riley Blue

20,961 posts

226 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Back in the '70s I went to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia, going a day earlier than planned as someone at work wanted to swap their day off. Around lunchtime I had a pint on the Guinness stand, tossing my plastic glass into a waste bin at the top of an escalator.

24 hours later an IRA bomb exploded in that same waste bin.

take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey

5,158 posts

55 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
steviegunn said:
Got a couple of ones from working offshore to add.

I was working on the DSV Witchqueen laying umbilical pipe at East Breaks in the Gulf of Mexico in 1995 when hurricane Opal decided to head towards us, as we had pipe attached to the rig we had to ride it out, just after midnight the whole ship lost all power and started drifting in very rough seas, all aboard were stood at muster stations ready to abandon ship, after a couple of hours of being battered around power was restored, the umbilicals had acted as a sea anchor and probably saved the ship from rolling over, trashed the pipes and turned a 10 day job into a 2 month one.

In 1994 on the Europipe Project (big gas pipeline from Sleipnir in Norway to Emden in Germany) during one of the pre-site surveys the magnetometer pick up some targets, the ROV was sent to investigate and I was in the ROV cabin when the driver approached the round metallic object with spikes and proceeded to run into it with the ROV under the ship in about 30m of water, turned out to be a mine that if it had gone off could have sunk the survey ship, Danish Navy came in to deal with it, we found well over a dozen mines on that project.
Second one... yikes

For that very reason, why would you operate an rov under the ship unless you really had to?

Hard-Drive

4,079 posts

229 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Again, pretty trivial compared to some on here but...

My mum was an air stewardess back in the 60s/70s, and was supposed to be on Papa India, the Trident that came down in Staines. Obviously I wasn't around back then, and indeed would not have been if her roster hadn't changed. Although apparently I was on board, yet to be born, during some tyre blowout on takeoff where it ended up on the grass.

I've also done the obligatory running out of talent on a motorbike and sliding down the road on my arse whilst brushing past the tyres of an oncoming car. Got up and was absolutely fine, albeit a bit sore the next day! Only other lucky escapes were somehow avoiding catching Covid-19 in Ischgl (epicentre of the European outbreak) earlier this year, and then 2 weeks later getting the absolute last flight out of Austria to the UK before airspace lockdown.

steviegunn

1,416 posts

184 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey said:
Second one... yikes

For that very reason, why would you operate an rov under the ship unless you really had to?
Not sure the ship had probably just drifted and no-one had noticed, the vessel and ROV position tracks were monitored much more closely from then on.

take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey

5,158 posts

55 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
steviegunn said:
Not sure the ship had probably just drifted and no-one had noticed, the vessel and ROV position tracks were monitored much more closely from then on.
I bet they did...rofl

Id have loved to have seen the look on the rov operators face when he/she realised what they'd just bumped into.

so called

9,090 posts

209 months

Monday 29th June 2020
quotequote all
Some shocking stories on here.

Many years ago, working in Crewe Loco Works as a Maintenance Electrician.
Not long finished my apprenticeship I was called to a broken down overhead crane.
To get to the crane, myself and my apprentice, Ray, had to climb the crane drivers ladder and then walk down the track before climbing onto the crane wheel housing and onto the crane.
The tracks were bolted down onto the large structural beams in the roof and meant that there wasn't a flat surface to walk on.
Even the securing bolt heads were set too close together to fit your foot between.
With nothing either side to hold on to, it wasn't a very pleasant early morning walk.
I also noted the great globs of grease that had dripped onto the track from the wheel housing where it got parked up at end of shift.

We'ed spent about 30 minutes fault finding when someone announced "breakfast break time".
We set off back down the track, me having told my apprentice to be careful as he went in front of me.
As Ray stepped onto the ladder platform, I was stepping over the grease and stubbed my toe on a bolt head.
I was gone, nothing to reach out for and a concrete floor 45 foot bellow staring back at me.
Ray, that wonderful young 18 year old, had decided to wait on the platform to make sure I was OK.
He grabbed my wrist and yanked me onto the platform. bow

It was even harder after breakfast walking back down the track on jelly legs. nono


Edited by so called on Monday 29th June 11:49